Hey guys, in this video we’ll talk about the rest of the Reaper plugins we’ll cover
in this tutorial series.
In the previous video, we covered the compressor, delay, and equalizer plugins.
This time, we’ll cover the noise gate, automatic and manual pitch correction, reverb, and multiband
compression.
Before watching this video, just make sure you’ve checked out the previous videos in
this series so you’re all caught up.
The next plugin is the ReaGate, which is basically the opposite of the compressor we looked at
earlier.
First we set a threshold.
When working with a noise gate, we want our threshold to be above the level of the noise,
but below any of the sound that we want to pass through the gate.
This varies depending on the track and will require a little tweaking.
Also be careful since making adjustments to plugins that may be added before a gate can
affect this as well.
When the signal exceeds the threshold, the gate will allow it to play.
Otherwise it is stopped or reduced in level.
Like with compression, we can control the timing of how the gate activates.
The attack sets the transition time when the signal is allowed to pass through and the
release sets the transition for it to fade back out.
We don’t always want the signal to immediately start to release when the level drops below
the threshold since this can cause it to cut out too often.
The hold time sets a period after the level drops below the threshold before the gate
starts to release.
If the level peaks again during this time, the gate will not release.
We also have hysteresis which acts as a buffer zone around the threshold to prevent the gate
from closing when the signal barely drops below it.
Sometimes we’ll also have problems where the signal spikes at the beginning and the
gate doesn’t react quickly enough to capture this.
The pre-open in this case acts as a look ahead to open the gate a few milliseconds before
the spikes.
The noise gate also has detector settings and these work in the same way as the compression.
One trick you can do with a sidechain gate is gated reverb, and we covered how to do
that in Reaper in a previous video on this channel.
The far right side has controls for the wet and dry mix levels.
You’ll typically leave these as 0 for wet and –infinity for dry, so only the processed
signal passes through.
If you don’t want to reduce the noise all the way, turn up the dry signal slightly.
The noise slider creates a bit of white noise.
This can be set to –infinity so that there’s no noise added.
Our first plugin is the ReaTune plugin, and this has 3 functions in Reaper.
The modes are tuning, automatic pitch correction and manual pitch correction.
In tuning mode, the plugin is applied to the track and input monitoring is turned on.
Then you can tune an instrument like an electric guitar using the plugin.
The main features of this plugin are the pitch correction capabilities.
To turn on automatic pitch correction, click the box at the top.
In automatic mode, the pitch will automatically jump to a note in the key that is selected.
The key can be selected with the two drop downs.
You can also manually choose the notes that can be snapped to.
The pitch correction as has attack time, since you won’t want the pitch correction to immediately
change the pitch.
That can cause a robotic sound and make it snap all over the place to fast.
Then we can set it to stereo or mono.
The recommended algorithm for vocals is elastique soloist, which is set as the default.
You can adjust the parameter if you need to make a more natural pitch correction.
For more control over the pitch, we can use the manual pitch correction instead.
In this mode, we can draw a bar by clicking and dragging over the section of the track.
The pitch correction plugin will automatically draw out a graph of the pitch over time.
Then we can drag the bar up or down to change the pitch.
We can also extend or shorten the bar by dragging the ends, or delete it with the delete key
on the keyboard.
The prevent octave shifts stops Reaper from pitch shifting the harmonics, and prevent
overlapping segments makes it so we can’t draw two pitch correction lines that overlap.
The reverb plugin included with Reaper is called ReaVerberate.
Once again, we can start with a preset at the top, or start from scratch.
You’ll notice there are some that are called inserts and sends.
If you choose an insert, it applies dry and wet signal.
A send will have only the wet signal, since the dry signal will still be going through
the original track that went to the send.
The inserts are meant for single instruments or tracks, and the sends to combine different
tracks.
You can however, use these in either way by adjusting the wet/dry mix level.
On the left, we have our wet and dry mix levels that we just discussed.
When working with a reverb, keep in mind that keeping the dry level at 0 and adding a wet
signal will make the volume louder than the original track, so if you want to keep the
same level, you’ll need to bring the dry level down a little.
Now let’s look at some of the controls.
The first is the room size, making it sound like it’s either a small or a large rom.
Then there’s the dampening.
This will adjust between a smooth reverb, or one with a lot of fluttering high frequencies.
It will adjust the tone of the room.
Stereo width can be used to make the stereo width narrower or wider.
If you need to increase the size of the reverb further, then adjust the initial delay or
the reverb.
Last, we have the lowpass and highpass.
Lowpass will reduce the high frequencies, and highpass will reduce the low frequencies.
The last plugin we’ll cover in Reaper is ReaXcomp.
This is Reaper’s multiband compressor.
With a multiband compressor, you’re able to add different amounts of compression across
the frequency range of a track.
Sometimes I’ll use this to smooth out certain frequencies, such as a large amount of bass
that is overpowering.
You can reduce the dynamic range of those frequencies, without having to cut it down
completely like an equalizer would od.
First, there are 4 tabs at the top for the separate frequency ranges.
We can add and delete tabs at the bottom, like we had in the delay and EQ in previous
videos.
With each tab, we can activate or deactivate it with an active selector.
The range of the frequencies the band controls is determined by the top frequency slider.
You’ll be able to see this on the graph above as well.
The tab has a threshold, ratio, knee, attack, release, RMS size, auto makeup, and gain like
we saw from the previous compressors.
There’s also a gain control for the entire plugin on the right.
Program dependent release modifies attack and release based on the frequency.
Feedback detector prevents feedback.
Thanks for checking out this video on the noise gate, autotune, reverb and multiband
compression plugins in Reaper.
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